Interest in advanced intelligent networks (AINs) providing enhanced communications services has increased. Telecommunications service providers have begun to use equipment from multiple vendors to offer a variety of service features in an open-standard environment. Such features include call transfer, call conferencing, voice mail, call forwarding, caller ID, fax on demand, voice response services and many others.
The ability to provide enhanced features has come largely from the emergence of AIN. In order to connect to the AIN, intelligent AIN-compatible switches are used.
While there is significant enthusiasm to provide such enhanced features supported by the AIN, current AIN standards may not include methods that permit the recording and billing for features provided in a service node located in an AIN.
Accordingly, the need has arisen for a technology to provide recording and billing for AIN features provided by a service node.